Palliative Care Association Miri

Funding for palliative care has always been a challenge, together with the increasing cancer patients in Malaysia that recognized as the fourth leading cause of death among medically certified deaths (Chin 2002). They usually get donations from patients' family, community and government. Yet, donors are still limited and decreasing in number. In average, they need to spend approximately $9,000 monthly for the salaries of their two full time nurses, expenses for nursing materials such as bandages and solutions, administrative costs and the fees for staff training. In addition, they did not get any privilege such as tax exemption despite of trying so hard during the previous years. Another factor is that there are not much of people in Miri aware of the association. Palliative Care has been recognized as an urgent humanitarian need internationally and the development of palliative care service has steadily grown over the past decade. Thus the Palliative Care Association needs to be ready to cope with the progress by maintaining a committed group of volunteers which is an extremely important task for the Association. However, they are currently having a resource shortage at the volunteer level. They are demanding on looking more volunteers to help them to raise more funds and create more awareness about the importance and the need for palliative care. In the other hand, they are currently facing accommodation problem in which the location they are presently using is a part of government's land, due to Palliative Care Association is a non-government organization and they are unable to operate equally with the government organization, hence they are restricted to have further use of the government's land. And they are required to move out from the General Hospital and seek for a new home. Besides the accommodation problem, Palliative Care Association also face transportation problem visiting their patients at the rural area.